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avoided answering a question from Senator Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, on whether she believed the scientific consensus on man-made climate change. Barrett called that question “a very contentious matter of public debate,”

uestioning her, Graham invited the judge to give a preview of how she might rule to save — not overturn — the Affordable Care Act.

Her willingness to answer in the affirmative, and to get into theoretical details around a possible ruling, stood in stark contrast to her tight-lipped responses to questions from many Democrats, including Booker.

Biden’s campaign has flatly rejected the report, which Facebook and Twitter viewed as so dubious that they limited access to the article.

NBC will host a town hall event with Trump at 8 p.m.

The two candidates had been scheduled to face off in a debate tonight until Trump withdrew last week,

“TrickBot’s botnet has infected hundreds of thousands, if not millions of computers,”

Its operators started cataloging the computers they infected, noting which belonged to large corporations, hospitals and municipalities, and selling access to infected computers to cybercriminals and state actors.

Over the past year, TrickBot has become the primary delivery mechanism for the Russian-speaking cybercriminals behind a specific variant of ransomware, known as Ryuk, that has been paralyzing American hospitals, corporations, towns and cities

others point to attacks on the Georgian government by cybercriminals at the direction of the Kremlin and a breach at Yahoo. In that attack, two Russian agents at the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., teamed up with two cybercriminals to hack 500 million Yahoo accounts, allowing criminals to profit while mining their access to spy on journalists, dissidents and American officials.

They also note that when the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on members of an elite Russian cybercrime group in December, they outed the group’s leader as a member of the F.S.B.

“Russia is well aware that the cybercriminals it harbors have become a serious problem for its adversaries,” Mr. Hultquist added. “Russian cybercriminals are probably a greater threat to our critical infrastructure than their intelligence services. We should start asking whether their tacit approval of cybercrime is not just a marriage of convenience but a deliberate strategy to harass the West.”

I will also state that I see much to admire in the ultra-Orthodox way of life: the sense of community and mutual responsibility, the emphasis on study, the devotion to tradition. And yet, I also feel an urgent need to advise ultra-Orthodox Jews to adapt to a new reality, one in which ultra-Orthodoxy’s great success — its ability to thrive in a modern world — has become its great challenge.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism today is based on strict adherence to Jewish law, a highly conservative worldview and a rejection of many components of the modern world (from evolutionary science to television), with the aim of erecting a shield against secularization and assimilation.

eventy years ago, with the destruction of most ultra-Orthodox communities in Europe in the Holocaust, some assumed that the end of this branch of Judaism was near. However, with stubbornness and sophistication, high birthrates and social cohesion, ultra-Orthodox communities are growing and thriving.

Socially, Haredi neighborhoods and towns tend to be less than hospitable to outsiders, and as the neighborhoods expand, clashes with neighbors are common. So these communities are gradually becoming harder to ignore. And the pandemic might be the ultimate demonstration of the emerging problem. In Jerusalem and New York, where these Jews live in great and fast-growing numbers, a puzzled public begins to feel these communities have become too independent.

But the disobedience of a strong community — particularly one that could affect the health of the larger public — is more difficult to defend.

If Americans become hostile to the community, the consequences could be even graver. Anti-Semitism, already on the rise, feeds on fear and suspicion.

"The heart and soul of this country's at stake right in Florida. It's up to you. You hold the key," Biden told a diverse group of voters. "If Florida goes blue, it's over. It's over."

No swing state looms larger than Florida, prized for its 29 electoral votes and its role as a national barometer.

Trump won those three Midwestern states by less than a percentage point in 2016, and Biden's kinship with the blue collar voters who live in working class towns like Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he lived as a young boy, was one of the major selling points to Democratic primary voters

While Trump has campaigned, both in 2016 and 2020, as a voice for the "forgotten men and women" who live in those communities, Biden has argued that the President ignored their needs while helping his wealthy allies

A key facet of Biden's success in 2020, however, is that he has cut into Trump's margins with White voters who do not hold a college degree -- a trend he hopes to accelerate in the closing days of the campaign as he tends to those key Midwestern states.

Trump predicted the US would see "the greatest red wave" in history on Tuesday.

Biden's visit Thursday was preceded by events in recent days featuring former President Barack Obama, who won the state twice.

They say the fact that he has nobody at all show up is because of Covid. No, it's because nobody shows up," Trump said to laughter in Tampa. "And I think that's the ultimate poll. And based on the numbers that we're getting, we're going to do really well on Tuesday."

he tried to push back throughout the day on the President's false claims about rampant voter fraud and what he views as Trump's efforts to suppress the vote, particularly in Black and Brown communities.

"He knows if you vote, he can't win. He knows when America votes, they reject people like him,"

Trump renewed his efforts to cut into Biden's margins within the diverse community of Latino voters in Florida. At this late stage of the race, Biden is struggling to win over Latinos at the same level that Clinton did as Democratic allies worry that time is running out, and both candidates made their cases to voters of Cuban, Venezuelan and Puerto Rican descent on Thursday.

The President's last minute effort in Minnesota, which Clinton won last cycle, appears to be even more of a long shot. Biden held a double-digit lead over Trump last month in the Washington Post/ABC News poll there

One of the perils for Trump in Florida is his sliding support among seniors, which has been driven in part by broad disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus and the fact that older voters have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

the President downplayed the fall surge in coronavirus cases during his huge rally in Tampa

The push by the two Trump allies to curtail the number of tests coincided with a precipitous drop in testing in Florida, according to CNN reporting, and the state is now grappling with the fall surge.

Trump claimed that the smaller attendance prescribed by the Biden campaign is driven by a lack of enthusiasm.

The two candidates will cross paths again on Friday when they both campaign in Wisconsin and Minnesota,

"Donald Trump just held a superspreader event here again. He's spreading more than just coronavirus. He's spreading division and discord," he said hours later in Tampa.

"Millions of people out there are out of work, on the edge. Can't see the light at the end of the tunnel and Donald Trump has given up," Biden said.

Earlier the same day, Mr. Trump ridiculed the notion that the virus was spreading rapidly again, falsely telling a crowd in Lansing, Mich., that the reported “spike in cases” was merely a reflection of increased testing

His determination to brush aside the ongoing crisis as a campaign issue has become the defining choice of his bid for a second term and the core of his message throughout the campaign’s endgame.

a Marquette University Law School poll published Wednesday showed that 58 percent of voters there disapproved of the president’s handling of the pandemic. Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in the crucial state by five percentage points.

The country has reported more than 8.8 million cases of the coronavirus, including a 39 percent increase in new cases over the last 14 days.

More than 227,000 Americans have perished from the disease.

There is considerable evidence it is not working. The stock market, long the focal point of Mr. Trump’s cheerleading efforts, plunged by more than 900 points on Wednesday, suffering its worst drop in months as investors grappled with the mounting disruptions wrought by the pandemic. Polling and interviews with voters show that most are not inclined to trust Mr. Trump’s sunny forecast.

Last week, she was dismayed to see that Mr. Trump was holding a rally in her area, because it had the potential to help spread the disease

A national poll published recently by The Times found that nearly two in five voters agreed with Mr. Trump that the worst of the crisis was over

In the same Times survey, most voters said that the worst of the pandemic was still ahead, including half of independent voters and a fifth of Republicans. By a 12-point margin, voters said they preferred Mr. Biden to lead the response to the pandemic rather than Mr. Trump. And 59 percent of voters said they favored a national mask mandate, including majorities of Democratic and independent voters, and three in 10 Republicans.

Mr. Biden, 77, has kept a strictly limited campaign schedule, holding no large rallies and traveling far less frequently than a typical presidential nominee.

“Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up,” Admiral Giroir said, urging Americans to wear masks and avoid clustering indoors

“not going to control the pandemic” — a remark Mr. Biden brandished as confirmation that Mr. Trump was capitulating.

In Wisconsin, where new cases have skyrocketed by 46 percent in the last two weeks, Mike Mitchell, a retail manager who backs Mr. Trump, blamed out-of-town visitors for the uptick in his area

I may not agree with the way he tweets and everything else, but he’s turned this country around, and he’ll do it again,” said Mr. D’Amato, 71, who wore a mask to vote near downtown Fort Myers last week.

Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.

Wait, it gets worse. In last week’s debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their naked eyes that it isn’t.

Trump repeatedly claimed that thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.

On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.

That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so he doesn’t.

What’s scary about all this isn’t just the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.

Indeed, current Republican strategy is almost entirely based on trying to scare voters about bad things that aren’t happening —

“at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”

I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.

History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy.

You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces.

“That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”

He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.

Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.Or not.

For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.”

“were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”

Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties.

“Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”

Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.”

“I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,”

In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general, having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review.

“President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”

To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well.

There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.

“sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge.

Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.

A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe.

Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves.

“stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation.

Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet.

Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.

That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.

Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”

Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.

There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted.

The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official.

Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants.

In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers.

The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,”

“They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified.

You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”

"While commonly plotted as points on maps, earthquakes of this size are more appropriately described as slip over a larger fault area," the USGS said. It added that a 7.0 magnitude quake would normally have a fault area of 50 by 20 kilometers — about 31 by 12 miles.

But as cases skyrocket again in many states, many health officials have conceded that interviewing patients and dutifully calling each contact will not be enough to slow the outbreak. “Contact tracing is not going to save us,” said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, chief medical officer at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, where hospitalizations in the county have soared by more than 400 percent and officials issued a new order for residents to stay at home.

Uncovering the path of transmission from person to person, known as contact tracing, is seen as a key tool for containing the spread of the coronavirus.

Infections are rising in 41 states, the country is recording an average of more than 79,000 new cases each day, and more Americans say they feel left to do their own lonely detective work.

The problem, of course, is that failing to fully track the virus makes it much harder to get a sense of where the virus is flourishing, and how to get ahead of new outbreaks.

In some places, overwhelmed health officials have abandoned any pretense of keeping up.

Now, though, any sense of control has vanished. Active cases of Covid-19 have quadrupled since the beginning of October to 912 in Grand Forks County, and about half the people contacted by the health department say they are not sure how they became infected.

In earlier, quieter periods of the pandemic, the virus spread with some degree of certainty. In all but the hardest-hit cities, people could ask a common question — “Where did you get it?” — and often find tangible answers.

A popular college bar in East Lansing, Mich., Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub, became a hot spot this summer after dozens of people piled into the bar, drinking, dancing and crowding close together. At least 192 people — 146 people at the bar and 46 people with ties to those at the bar — were infected. Afterward, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shut down indoor dining in bars in parts of the state.

Heidi Stevens is among the newly infected who considers her case a mystery. As a columnist at The Chicago Tribune, Ms. Stevens works from home. Her children attend school online. She wears a mask when she goes for a run, and she has not had a haircut since January.So when she got a precautionary test a few weeks ago, with the hopes of inviting friends over to have cake for her daughter’s 15th birthday, Ms. Stevens was shocked to learn she was positive.

A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. Italy faces this second strain while already battling the previous one.

Y. pestis also heads east from Sicily into the Persian Empire and through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and south to Egypt, as well as Cyprus, which is also hit with destruction from an earthquake and deadly tidal wave at the same time.

The plague also moves through Austria and Switzerland, where a fury of anti-Semitic massacres follow it along the Rhine after a rumor spreads that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells

The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.

The plague enters England through the port of Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. As it spreads through the town, some escape by fleeing inland, inadvertently spreading it further.

A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march, sing and thrash themselves with lashes until swollen and bloody. Originally the practice of 11th-century Italian monks during an epidemic, they spread out through Europe. Also known for their violent anti-Semitism,

the plague kills 60 percent of the Venetian population.

An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen

While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying. Choosing to retreat, the soldiers bring the disease back to their families and a third of Scotland perishes.

The plague’s spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities. All total, Europe has lost about 50 percent of its population.

With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changed society

It becomes easier to get work for better wages and the average standard of living rises.

Another connects civil war to their belief that a Trump loss is impossible, writing “If [Biden] wins, it’ll be from fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson that’ll have to be taught for that will necessarily be no less industrial.”Many welcome the prospect of armed conflict – one writes “That’s fine with me open season on democrats!”. Another deployed accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse as a positive example, writing “I think it will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and a lot of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”

Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.”

Donald Trump has not had a habit of attending church services weekly, though he made several appearances at the Episcopal church in West Palm Beach near his resort as well as at various evangelical churches across the country.

Barack Obama would go to church for the occasional Christmas or Easter service in Washington or on vacation in Hawaii, but rarely during the rest of the year. And George W. Bush, despite being a high-profile born-again Christian, tended to worship privately as president and only attended church when back home in Texas.

He fashioned himself as the candidate standing up for morality and decency, fighting for the soul of America and calling on the country to "embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do."

He's open about and proud that he's a Catholic,"

"Joe's faith isn't just part of who he is," said Sen. Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware and a friend of Biden's. "It's foundational to who he is."

He attended Catholic schools and married his first wife, Neilia, in a Catholic church. He peppers his political speech with quotes from Scripture, Catholic hymns and references to the nuns and priests he learned from in school.

And while it's unclear whether he will adopt a permanent parish in Washington during his term, Biden's churchgoing will not only provide a window into his spiritual side. It will also be core to his political brand -- apparent not just in the pursuit of his policy agenda but even in his schedule as President.

Since childhood, Biden has been a regular at Mass. He frequently worships with family members, often attending with some of his grandchildren in tow.

While touring across the country in his presidential campaign, Biden would quietly slip into a local Catholic church for Mass -- often coming in a few minutes late or leaving a few minutes early, to avoid the rush. He was even spotted attending daily Mass on Election Day at his parish in Wilmington, Delaware.

On the day Biden was inaugurated as Vice President in 2009, he asked O'Brien to preside over a private Mass at Georgetown beforehand

These services, said the priest, reflected how important the Catholic faith and ritual were to Biden, particularly on two of the most joyful days of his life. But his faith in Christ and devotion to the church also bolstered Biden during his lowest moments.

The President-elect, who regularly wears his late son's rosary on his wrist, has publicly spoken about the role his faith has played in carrying him through grief.

"I'm not trying to proselytize, I'm not trying to convince you to be, to share my religious views. But for me it's important because it gives me some reason to have hope and purpose," Biden shared earlier this year during a CNN town hall with a grieving pastor who'd lost his wife during the Charleston shooting, explaining that he'd promised his own dying son that he would continue to stay engaged and not retreat into himself.

Catholics have become integrated into American public life to the point where Biden's religious affiliation is just another point in his biography. The last three Speakers of the House have been Catholics, and so are the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. Biden was the first Catholic to serve as vice president.

CNN's exit polls showed Catholics were nearly evenly split, with 52% supporting Biden and 47% supporting Trump. That's an improvement for Biden over Hillary Clinton's performance with Catholics four years ago, when she lost them to Trump 50% to 46%.

Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at the conservative Catholic Association, said it will be difficult to separate Biden's liberalism on abortion and contraception from how he's viewed by Catholics -- especially because of how his campaign emphasized his faith.

"The issues where people have been the most divided and where the political left and the political right, and Catholics, have been so split are the issues where that department is going to be involved," McGuire said. "It was his move, and he sort of set a tone that suggests attack. And that's unfortunate."

"His faith is reflective of his compassion and empathy, his commitment to the vulnerable, and his service to the country," said O'Brien.

In India, Brazil and other countries, WhatsApp has become so important to the functioning of society that regulators should treat it as a “utility,” said Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director at IT for Change, a technology-focused nonprofit in Bengaluru, India.

Worldwide, 2.76 billion people on average used at least one Facebook product each day this June, according to the company’s statistics. WhatsApp is used to send more than 100 billion messages a day and has been downloaded nearly six billion times since 2014, when Facebook bought it, according to estimates from the data firm Sensor Tower.

India accounted for about a quarter of those installations, while another quarter were in Latin America, according to Sensor Tower. Just 4 percent, or 238 million downloads, were in the United States.

In Latin America, Facebook’s apps can be lifelines in rural places where cellphone service has yet to arrive but the internet is available, and in poor communities where people cannot afford mobile data but can find a free internet connection.

Across Africa, Facebook’s apps are so popular that for many, they are the internet. WhatsApp, the continent’s most popular messaging app, is a one-stop shop to communicate with family, friends, colleagues, fellow worshipers and neighbors.

The use of WhatsApp has grown so much that at one point it accounted for nearly half of all internet traffic in Zimbabwe. During the outage on Monday, the chief government spokesman in Tanzania used Twitter to urge the public to “remain calm.”

In Mexico, many small-town newspapers cannot afford print editions, so they publish on Facebook instead. That has left local governments without a physical outlet to issue important announcements, so they, too, have taken to Facebook, said Adrián Pascoe, a political consultant.

“The way businesses work, it’s been a crazy change in the last 20 years,” Mr. David said. “Then, we had no community online. Now we are hyper-connected, but we rely on a few tech companies for everything. When WhatsApp or Facebook are down, we all go down.”

maybe I'm taking too much of a kind of pleasure in being the town crier who comes out and says the emperor has no clothes, and I should be more circumspect about that. I don't know. But what I do know is that the facts will out in the end, no matter what. And we can spend our time trying to prettify something or we can look at it deadly in the face and then try to deal with it the best we can.

an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it;

Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.

Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.

A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths.

I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.

My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.

She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.

I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness:

Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.

Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.

In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England.

The authors identify the survey respondents who are most resistant to immigration:

These respondents are the oldest of any class and possess many of the traits typical of conservative southern whites. Many live in small towns or rural areas in the U.S. south and identify as Republicans. Further, many of them are retirees with low levels of education. Interestingly, these respondents live in the least diverse communities relative to all other classes as judged by the presence of few immigrants and ethnic/racial minorities in their ZIP codes, which highlights the subjective nature of immigrant archetypes.

The authors conducted a survey in which they explicitly provided information rebutting negative stereotypes of immigrants’ impact on crime, tax burdens and employment. They found that respondents in many cases shifted their views of immigrants from more negative to more positive assessments.

But shifts in a liberal direction on policies were short-lived, at best: “In sum,” Abascal, Huang and Tran wrote, the effects of the stereotype-challenging information “on beliefs about immigration are more durable than the effects on immigration policy preferences, which themselves decay rapidly

The decision to remove barriers to trade in goods and capital flows have had profound effects on immigration. Trade has meant the closure of businesses in developed countries that rely on low-skill labor. When these firms closed, they took their support for low-skill immigration with them.

The Republican Party was once the party of big business and the party that supported immigration as a source of cheap labor. What happened to turn it into the anti- immigration party?

corporate America’s need for cheap labor had been falling before the advent of Trump, and that that decline opened to door for Republican politicians to campaign on anti-immigrant themes.

These findings recommend caution when deploying factual information to change attitudes toward immigration policy.”

The ability of capital to move intensified this trend: whereas once firms needed to bring labor to their capital, they can now take their capital to labor. Once these firms move, they have little incentive to fight for immigration at home.

Finally, increased productivity, as both a product of and response to globalization, has meant that firms can do more with fewer workers, again decreasing demands for immigration. Together, these changes have led to less business support for immigration, allowing politicians to move to the right on immigration and pass restrictions to appease anti-immigration forces.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats, in the view of Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, have failed to counter Republican opposition to immigration with an aggressive assertion of the historical narrative of the United Statesas a nation of immigrants, tapping into the fact that nearly all Americans are descendant from immigrants who arrived into a land they did not originally populate, and that despite epochs of xenophobia and restriction, in the end the US has been a great machine of immigrant integration that has benefited the United States and made us an exceptional nation.

the intertwined forces of climate change, state failure, violence, and criminal economics will greatly complicate efforts to create a counternarrative by producing surges of asylum seekers and refugees, which could be managed with effective immigration and border policies, but which under current circumstances instead serves to produce images of chaos along the southern border.

The question for the future of the broader consensus on immigration is whether Republicans can continue to be successful despite the anti-immigrant pandering that is largely out of step with the broad American consensus on immigration. If they are electorally successful — and there is reason to believe they will be, given forecasts for Democratic losses in 2022 — then this broad consensus might break down permanently and a large portion of the American public may follow their Republican leaders toward more fully adopting anti-immigrant ideology.

There are potentially tragic consequences if the Democratic Party proves unable to prevent anti-immigration forces from returning to take over the debate

The average undocumented immigrant has been in the U.S. for ten years The problems of the undocumented spill over onto the large population of U.S. citizens, who are the children, mates, relatives of the undocumented and whose lives are adversely affected by the increasingly repressive policy environment.

for all intents and purposes, most undocumented immigrants — and perhaps especially the Dreamers — are Americans deserving of full citizenship.

But these Americans are on the political chopping block, dependent on a weakened Democratic Party to protect them from a renewal of the savagery an intensely motivated Republican Party has on its agenda.

Although we are all ruled by confirmation bias, I am hard-pressed to recall when the adults around me as a boy in Chicopee were talking about the healthy economy and the promise of opportunity. What I recall, mostly, is anxiety among our neighbors about jobs, even among the dwindling number of union households. Health care was cheaper, but health was more fragile. When my father had a mild heart attack in 1974, he was confined to the hospital for weeks instead of a few days, and his company allowed him to retire as “disabled.” Cancer was so terrifying that the word was not spoken aloud or mentioned in obituaries. Many elder-care facilities were Dickensian warehouses for the old.

The world of 40 or 50 years ago is not a better time in my memory; it was an era that seemed, at least to me, crowded mostly with dead ends and very few avenues out.

Today, my hometown is doing considerably better. The population loss that began in 1970 was halted some 30 years ago, and new businesses took over many of the abandoned lots. But the empty hull of the Uniroyal is still a reminder that the “forgotten towns” were forgotten a lot earlier than the dawn of the 21st century.

And yet this reality never seems to matter in political debates. Whether economic times are good or bad, this lament for the old days of factories and mills—jobs that were long gone before some voters were old enough to cast a ballot or were even born—never changes.

This obsession with decline is one of the myths surrounding postindustrial democracy that will not die.

To recognize honestly and with compassion that liberal democracies—and the people who run them—can produce awful outcomes is not an admission that democracy is hopeless; rather, it is the societal self-examination that is among the greatest duties of a citizen and a sign of virtue itself in a democratic society.

The reality of suffering, however, is the cudgel used by populists and illiberal elements of both the right and the left to attack the foundations of modern democracy. Liberalism thrives in the center, between the extremes, where negotiation and compromise and trust must rule the day in order to produce consensus and solutions. But the center—a place that discourages performative anger and drama, and instead is filled with the boring necessities of deliberation and trust—is difficult ground to defend when the pain of other human beings is mobilized in the battle for power.

What we should have learned from the experience of the last 50 years is not that democracy has failed but that voters and their elected representatives have joined forces in a game of rising expectations, immediate gratification, and very little accountability from anyone at any level. Unfortunately, to borrow from Yeats, the “worst are full of passionate intensity” as they try to convince their fellow citizens that the existence of suffering invalidates the liberal democratic ideal. This is an immense and cynical lie.

For anything to work at almost any level of government, citizens first have to accept that they live in a community. They have to begin with an assumption that finding common ground for solutions, however imperfect they may be, is possible. They have to believe that other human beings are sensible and amenable to goodwill. And they need to be honest about the past, and to dispense with false nostalgia.

In all, nearly 300 were killed.

In 2018 Zhengzhou announced a plan to ensure that nearly nine-tenths of its core urban area would be “spongified” by 2030.

About 70% of those cities are in floodplains.

Producing a sponge effect requires measures such as creating artificial wetlands, planting roadside shrubs and using permeable materials to build pavements and plazas.

Experts reckon that implementing the government’s sponge-city guidelines will cost at least $1trn nationwide.

It is the case that local governments sometimes misspend the money they are given for sponge-city building. They are often reluctant to use expensive land to create natural drainage systems such as parks and ponds.

they must be capable of absorbing rain without creating floods.

If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal

‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979

here was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged

During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.

The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging

. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting.

MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.

Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit

At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.

The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.

When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.

within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius

The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.

“It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”

Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.

The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists.

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas.

The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?

Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?

That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.

On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem.

During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible

We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.

William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.

“Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.

The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”

What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”

nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.” “It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”

Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.

One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure? The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said.

Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?

“Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change

these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice.

The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president.

‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981

In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.

After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter

Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?

Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’

Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.

Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English.

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982

Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this?

Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.

The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.”

That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.

There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”

Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy

the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s

It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.

“Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.” James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.” “Yes,” Hansen said.

How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production? Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions. “That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally. “My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone. “It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”

From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982

Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.

David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.

Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.

The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story.

The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.

1. ‘Caution, Not Panic’ 1983-1984

in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.

After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies

Then Reagan won the White House.

the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.

The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.

Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.

Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.

That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see

The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.”

On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.

George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”

Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.

Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest

2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985

3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986

Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.

Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986

F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change.

As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”

The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times).

After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”

The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.

The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.

Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement

Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.

John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined.

Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.

That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.

Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”

By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.

In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.

Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988

It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.

In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert.

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth. “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise. “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

“We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”

Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000. Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.

Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices.

Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.

Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.

The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.

Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent

global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.”

His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”

By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office

The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions

Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”

The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax

the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy.

One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.”

: On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.